Three Baboons - TLC 23

Watering red roses one rosy dawn on the Ankara balcony he met three baboons from a Russian tribe.

A blond corn-plaited hairy one stuck her head out a 3rd short story window and spit past trees. SPLAT. She looked around, smiling. Her upper teeth were small and sharp. He smiled. She jabbered sounds and articulated questions.

“Where do you come from?”

"Do you have money?"

“Are you alone?”

“Do you want sex?”

She strangled sounds but that’s the essence. Baboon language is simple and direct. Humans should be so lucky. He smiled. She smiled. They smiled at each other. She disappeared. She returned with two friends. One had dark hair, hard eyes and big floppy breasts. She shook them side-to-side.

“Look at these watermelons,” she said.

They were heavy fruit. Good enough to eat. Another baboon joined them. Blond, with sapphire eyes and straight short spiked bangs. She stuck out her tongue. A shiny silver post glistened. She was the playful one. Laughing like a child she rolled her tongue around, up and out, like a little snake, kissing phallus. Every now and then a one-eyed snake needs to find a cave. All three jabbered with inarticulate clear syntax.

“Where are you from?”

“Do you have any money?”

“Do you want sex?”

The plaited hair one got halfway out on the narrow balcony crouched down and opened her legs. She rode an imaginary wild mustang. Her eyes and face assumed a state of fluid ecstasy. Shake your moneymaker. The hard-eyed one massaged empty space.

He smiled at this spectacle. They laughed savoring the power of erotic visual suggestion. The silver-posted one flicked her tongue in and out like breathing. Full of energy they needed a verb.

Monkey see, Monkey say, Monkey do.

He waved currency at them. They smiled. He gestured I’m coming. They nodded and disappeared. He skipped downstairs, out the door, ran to their apartment and rang the bell. Ding-dong. Honey, I’m home. The blond plaited woman dragged him in and down a hall. “Ssh,” pointing at closed doors, “they are dreaming about their families in Kiev.”

They were polite. They played all morning introducing him to well lubricated Kama Sutra gymnastics. International relations improved. They made a triple-decker sandwich with trimmings. Let’s eat. 

Take amazing risks - TLC 22

“To do amazing things you have to take amazing risks and suffer greatly,” said Zeynep, his five-year old genius friend in Bursa.

 “Here,” she said, “many a-dolts stay with their mothers forever and a day because they are afraid of freedom and accepting responsibility for their lives. They eat fear morning noon and night. They are afraid to speak their honest feelings, to express their innate desire for independence. They are willing victims of traditional conservative attitudes and values. Free will is a foreign language. They are scared of taking risks, letting go and growing. I may grow old but I’ll never grow up. If I grow up I die.”

“I feel the same way.”

One day while sharing lunch and drawing in notebooks, he said, “When I was nine I was going on fifty. Now I am fifty going on nine. I exist outside adult time.”

“We are passing through,” she said lighting a candle in darkness.

After Ankara he’d accepted a new adventure in Bursa. This shocked everyone in the capital lower case. They assumed he’d stay with them forever. Students and teachers celebrated his transition with a sparkling cake. Women cried sadness and joy.

“We are not here for a long time, we are here for a good time,” said Sappho the poetess.

One adult student who’d articulated her desire to move to Constantinople during the Ottoman Empire seeking an educational engineering job in a quality control factory school producing obedient robotic idiot children and live with her boyfriend cowered behind her futile quest for independence from over-protective parents. “My father won’t let me.”

“Take control of your life. Get a grip. Let go. Jump. Discover courage and your wings on the way down.”

The Language Company

Sappho

Donate blood - TLC 19

Experience, a wonderful little teacher nowadays said, giving blood helps someone who needs it more than you. Survival luck. Giving blood gifts life.

Living safely is dangerous.

Lucky had rare A-. He donated after receiving permission from Ankara medical authorities. Yes you may, blood is no argument.

The blood bus sat near a busy downtown intersection. He walked past pretzel sellers, cascading water fountains and shit covered statues of hero soldiers firing rusty guns into cobalt skies.

Paying attention he heard imprisoned Turkish journalists crying, begging, and pleading for free speech in a totalitarian Deep State of Fear.

A voice in the wilderness cried out, “The application of Articles 6 and 7 of the Anti-Terror Law in combination with Articles 220 and 314 of the Turkish Criminal Code leads to abuses. In short, writing an article or making a speech can lead to a court case and a long prison sentence for membership or leadership in a terrorist organization. Together with possible pressure on the press by state officials and possible firing of critical journalists, this situation can lead to a widespread self-censorship.”

Dissent is terrorism, said the angry frightened Prime Minister, slapping a Soma miner for booing him in public. Oh the shame.

Lucky climbed on the bloodmobile express.

A smiling Bulgarian nurse asked health questions in broken English. Another nurse took blood pressure. She attached a tourniquet to his left arm. “You have excellent veins.”

She swabbed one and slid a needle in. “Open and close your left hand.” Blood river flowed.

Outside tinted windows in blinding sun Turkish, Armenian, Kurdish and Syrian parents gripped children’s wrists. Fingers never touched. Scraggly half-starved men unloaded boxes of tomatoes from a truck. Light reflected off cheerless sunglasses. Savage salivating salvage teams folded and loaded crushed cardboard boxes into metal carts.

Sad affective-disordered businessmen spilled black market Iranian nuclear fission material and Syrian VX chemical liquids into Ankara’s water supply. Sharing is caring.

Suchness, a heavy responsibility weighted lives.

Nurses waved goodbye, “You brought someone luck by donating life.”

“It’s a small powerful gift. One stranger helps another stranger.”

101 people lined up to donate platelets. “This should be fun,” a girl said to her mother, “I love needles.”

Tears flowed into The Dream Sweeper.

Divorce - Save face - TLC 17

“I know,” said an articulate woman lawyer in Unit 55 - Mastery level 68 - one day, “that my English is not grammatically perfect but I know my English is very fluent.”

“That’s beautiful and true,” said Lucky, seeing how she’d realized her confident nature to master a second language. He’d translate her awareness to students hoping her illumination would shine through their temerity.

He wrote on glass.

Foreign neurotic teachers lamented loss and dreams. One American’s joyful hyperactive energy regaled mentors with exhaustive stories about a stateside son. How he’d found a part-time job at Archery, a national discount chain, attended a technical school and bought a used Swedish car with a bloody knife in the trunk.

She talked a good game about writing. When it came down to the real work, she said, “I only write silly sentences.” She kept stringing word pearls on her lifeline. Positive therapy. She had a good heart.

Lucky gifted her a box of eight Honer blues harps before walking to Bursa. She was overjoyed. They were the only two deranged fools blowing.

Sometimes he blows and sometimes he sucks.

At TLC two drama queens from New Zealand and Scotland revealed personal horror stories of abandonment and neglect. Emotional histories expanded their quest for love with Turkish men confronting insecure masculine jealousies shattered by strangling mothers intent on controlling their little boys through prolonged adolescence rendering them insolvent and mute given to infantile behaviors and heartbreaking confusion in long strange fatal attractions.

Flower petals whispered, “He loves me, he loves me not.”

In Turkey divorce was seen as a failure. Shame on you, said Shame.

Marriage is a business deal with bad sex, said a heart broker, a form of volunteered slavery.

The majority of women knew their place and stayed in it. Blend in sweet thing. We’re in this for the long haul honey-bunny.

An emotional graveyard bloomed where mothers controlled and manipulated their offspring’s behavior, attitudes and counterfeit freedom with a heavy dictatorial hand called love. Working on love’s chain gang.

One was different. After seven months of marriage she filed divorce papers. She’d believed him in the beginning.

“I feel so much better. He lied to me. He courted me with sweet words and I thought, or believed I thought or thought I believed he had an open mind but I was disappointed because he wasn’t honest...so after weeks then months I saw his, how do you say, irresponsibility, how he wouldn’t contribute his heart to me, to our relationship and then, when I tried to talk to him he was closed to me, he shut down emotionally and I was working and trying to keep the flat up and work on our relationship but I saw it was difficult, then really impossible to live with everything in my brain and heart.”

She exhaled. “Now, when he saw my action to end the marriage he was filled with remorse and regret and apologies. But it’s too late. I told him to move out. Sent him home to his mama. He bothers me everyday in his childlike whining way but it’s over. I can handle it. I am strong and know what I want in my life. My family is very supportive of my decision.”

“Good for you. In China it’s about saving face. Fake face lies. Appearances. You’ve realized growth and self-respect. Some discover their courage, take control of their lives and some don’t.”

“I am not living the lie anymore. I feel free.”

“You discovered courage and accepted responsibility for your life. I am happy for you. Your heart-mind is calm. Be well.”

Winterhawk - TLC 16

Winterhawk is his Fountain Penmanname.

He rolled past a sea and mountains toward Instant Bull in a train dining car. Snowfields stretched to infinity. Pink and green stems bloomed wild yellow flowers. Click clack. Shine your light. Be light about it.

The train trundled through starlight star bright first star I see tonight I wish I may I wish I might create a surrealistic memory. Dancing elemental rivers, sagas and oral transmissions married fallow winter fields.

Bundled children waved goodbye at a remote one-stop station.

Long ago and far away with a wisdom heart-mind of intent soft eyes lived in interior and exterior landscape languages.

Winter Hawk wingspread read cold air. I am free to fly. My only imaginary fear is leaving the sky. It protects me. As long as I stay below it I am safe. I feel free in dreams. It’s all instinct and sensation being crystal light easy gliding like smiling and laughing. I absorb steam vapors rising off blue-green rivers below me as I zoom over red mountains swooping through groves of tall Aspen trees singing their wavering bark dancing branches. In my vivid winter world strong wings brush reflections inside star trails. My destiny is to remember everything. Sky welcomes my wing song.

The overnight take the A train to Constantinople tracking along a blue sea passed freighters and natural gas orange flames burning stars under a bone white moon, rolling 
click-clack.

A Turkish woman closed her drapes. Below her blindness 
two veiled lovers escaping the tyranny of familial expectations cherishing shadows held hands in a deserted street.

Train whistles serenaded 
invisible villages.

Long haul semi beams illuminated a black ribbon. Barb wire train stations imprisoned 
sad-faced men staring at ground zero waiting 
for life 
to unfold 
its precious fragrance. Moonlight released aromas of purple prosaic grapes.

An Istanbul commuter ferry churning blue water waves 
in elemental light envisioned blue mosques, silver spire needles and crescent domes.

TLC